Sugar

(Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 9.1.2009)

If there’s one genre everyone loves, it’s a good, clean sports drama, one that never strays from the well-traveled rags-to-riches road (bonus points if there’s a discernible hero and villain, who go head-to-head on the playing field during the final act). Fortunate for anyone who’s not "everyone," Half Nelson collaborators Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden have put another unique spin on a deceptively conventional narrative blueprint, bucking sports drama convention with the baseball-themed Sugar.

The story begins ordinarily enough: a Dominican baseball pitcher dubbed Sugar is recruited to rural Midwest America in hopes of becoming a Major League contender. From the outset, this brings about alienation and conflict, owing mostly to the language barrier (poor guy only knows how to order French toast) and other cultural disparities.

For a while, we get the typical baseball movie trajectory, complete with a predictable winning-streak montage -- albeit one counterbalanced with a crunchy TV On The Radio tune -- that’s swiftly followed by our titular character beginning to notice that his external problems are also being met with internal ones. Before long, this debilitating complex puts his status as a pitcher in jeopardy.

And this is where the plot really gets engaging. The third act tosses a curveball, resulting in no big game triumph and the dissolution of our formulaic, fairy tale expectations. Instead, we get an accurate portrayal of working class melancholy, extending beyond Sugar’s plight to an entire community of displaced outsiders attempting to assimilate themselves into an unfamiliar society. The outcome is not quite peaches and gravy, but a sense of cultural solidarity remains at the core all the same.

Unfortunately, the studio has made one significant blunder with this release, choosing not to include the film in its intended form. Sugar’s R-rated theatrical cut has been replaced with a family friendly PG-13 re-cut -- and yet the Blu-ray contains the film in its original incarnation. Is Sony under the mistaken impression that all mature audiences and film purists will catch up with this film on Blu-ray instead of DVD? Could they have at least indicated this modification on the packaging so that fans might make an informed decision, rather than unknowingly purchase a watered-down version of the film?

Moving back to the positive: extras are brief, but effective. We get a 15-minute making-of that uses clever split-screens to intercut interviews with behind-the-scenes footage, a featurette on Latin American baseball hopefuls (with pro-ballers like Sammy Sosa chiming in), a fleeting interview with the film’s star Algenis Perez Soto and, lastly, five deleted scenes.

More bittersweet than sweet, Sugar is never too syrupy. While it isn’t a total grand slam, it still manages to knock a few out of the park. Jaded viewers should give this a spin -- in either rendering, I reluctantly suppose -- if only because it rises above tired genre clichés. -- Neil Karassik